Friday, March 14, 2014

Tip Top

At Lincoln Center’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, Writer/Director
Serge Bozon’s Tip Top, starring Isabelle Huppert, Sandrine Kiberlain and
François Damiens is a fun and funny film, when
the three are on screen. They play
wacked out cops with weird and hilarious foibles both sexual and otherwise.

However, when they’re not on screen, the film fails big
time. The plot is incomprehensible and a
huge bore, causing audible yawns throughout the audience.

Bozon should have studied the TV drama NCIS
to understand how to pull this off, correctly.
On that show, the audience tunes in, not for the plot, but to watch the main
characters interact with each other. The weekly plot, though secondary, is,
nevertheless, interesting or, at least, comprehensible and comes to a satisfying
resolution. Here, the plot is
incomprehensible until near the end, but, by that time, we don’t care and it is incomplete,
anyway.

Bozon is energetic and was trying to show off what he
thinks was a breakthrough political storyline, but we didn’t care. Only the interaction of his main characters
was of interest, when they were the focus.

The film would be better, if he left out the story and
just kept the scenes where his actors went wild.

I give Tip Top a 3 out of 5 for the
wonderful work of Huppert, Kiberlain and Damiens.

About Me

Brian Porzak: I am a cinephile who likes to view films with a live audience. My taste runs the gamut, including indies, studio films, foreign films and most all genres. Because I see so many films, friends often ask me what to see. So, I thought I'd blog about what is worth seeing or not. As a writer/filmmaker myself, I hope to give a more uplifting perspective than the typical critic. Filmmaking is tremendously difficult. Just because some problems might exist in a particular work does not, necessarily, destroy its enjoyability and I think that is necessary to point out to would-be viewers.
See www.Aix-en-Film.com